Presented by Intel

The Brains

Anthony Tripaldi

Creative Technologist

Anthony Tripaldi is a Creative Technologist at Firstborn, where he describes himself as a full-stack dev who loves tinkering with the latest technologies. His background is animation, video editing and design, but he found his calling in the heyday of Flash and interactive development. “There’s something inherently different between something that’s two-dimensional, flat and unresponsive, and something that’s 3D, and interactive and moves with you,” says Tripaldi. “I can write code and create a whole new world.“ Tripaldi's next tech frontier? Coding for the world of virtual reality.

When I sit down and make something, it's not meant for deep philosophical consideration. I just want people to have fun and enjoy the experience.

Jonathan Kim

Designer

Jonathan Kim is a multi-disciplinary creative director at the New York digital agency Firstborn, with experience in the fields of motion graphics and experiential design. Since 2005, he has done award-winning design and direction for some of the world’s top brands, including Nike, Oreo, Disney, Toyota, MTV and Hyundai. A former dancer, Kim is inspired by the ways art and design can take on new forms as technology evolves to create new experiences. “There are new areas where you can apply design, and that’s what excited me and how I navigated my career -- starting off with static images, then moving onto motion graphics and now at a digital shop,” says Kim.

Technology has gotten to a point where beautiful design and graphics can be experienced at your fingertips.

The Process

"Jon and I have been trying to work together for a while, I consider him a brilliant visual artist,” says Anthony Tripaldi, who works with Jonathan Kim at the digital agency Firstborn. Though they respect one another's work and skills, they don't often get to collaborate on in-depth projects. For Duality, they relished the opportunity to sit down at a whiteboard, throw some ideas on the wall and see what stuck – a difficult task, because they were working with few parameters and a short timeline.

Anthony started tinkering with JavaScript and WebGL to see if anything visually compelling popped up that they could run with. After some iterating, the pair decided to build a geolocation-based audio visualizer, Rack City, hosted on a website that would run on any device with the latest web browsers, including an Intel-powered tablet.

"The tablet was great for on-the-spot design ideation. Utilizing different sketch apps, I was able to draw on top of images and give Anthony detailed design direction as he coded," says Jonathan.

While audio visualizers are nothing new, the location-based element added an interesting twist – and some challenges – to the buildout of the product.

People are accustomed to mapping apps that show detailed 3D representations of buildings and cities all over the world. But the majority of that data is off-limits, so the duo decided to pull in data from the user-populated OpenStreetMap data API, which houses information for 21 million miles of roads and 78 million buildings. Anthony and Jonathan realized this building data could help them create a new, digital world for the user to explore. But the vast amount of data would hinder the load time and speed of their product, so they had to get creative.

“We really wanted to take the extreme VFX and slim it down to get it to run in real time in a browser,” says Anthony. The duo ended up focusing on just three types of location data: highways and primary roads, secondary roads and trails, and buildings.

In the visualization, a user can type in his favorite track or mix on SoundCloud, and the screen will display a custom visualization that responds to the music and the exact location of the user, anywhere in the world. If your location doesn't have enough in OpenStreetMap, don't fret -- a simple dropdown can show you the experience in cities like Chicago, Paris, and London.

The movement of the structures and roads adapts based on the music, so listening to the same song at your office and your home result in two very different visual experiences.

"The biggest challenge for me as a designer is figuring out a look and feel that’s complementary to any location on the globe, whether you're in a bustling city or a suburban area," says Jonathan. "I've been having a blast figuring out the right tone."

Though their work today sits in two separate disciplines, Anthony and Jonathan share similar backgrounds in design and motion graphics, which provides a solid foundation on which they build something new and exciting.“I give him the design direction, and he brings it to life in an interactive experience,” says Jonathan. "Day by day, I’m impressed by how interactive things can get.""We sit, we tweak, we work together, we play with colors, we play with widths," says Anthony. "Jonathan makes it pretty, and I make it work."